Yinong (Oliver) Wang

Thesis Master Student

Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA

About me

I am a second-year Master of Science in Robotics (MSR) student in the Human Sensing Lab at the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Fernando De la Torre. Previously, I obtained my Bachelor of Mathematics in Computer Science & Computational Math (double major) and Statistics (minor) from the University of Waterloo, Canada, where I was honoured to be advised by Prof. Pascal Poupart and Prof. Yuri Boykov.

Outside school, I worked on Alexa as a Software Development Engineer at Amazon Canada and also advantured with my own startup SpicyGrit. During my undergraduate, I was also fortunate to intern at NVIDIA autonomous vehicle team, Huawei Noah's Ark Lab Canada, Genesys Canada, FGF Brands.

Seeing the potentials and challenges of AI solutions in the industry, I am devoted to developing robust and trustworthy AI and advance the frontier of AI readiness. My research interests lie at the intersection of responsible AI and foundation models, with a data-centric perspective.

Please free to reach out for research, entrepreneurship, collaborations or a casual chat. I'd love to have a conversation.

Education

M.S. in Robotics
Sept. 2022 -- present

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
B.Math. in Computer Science & Computational Math
Sept. 2018 -- Jul. 2022

University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON

News

11/2023: Two papers are submitted to CVPR 2024.
09/2022: I am back to school and started my grad school journey as a Master student at CMU.
08/2021: I joined Amazon to make Alexa a better assistant.
08/2020: I graduated from University of Waterloo and onward to my entrepreneurship advanture.

Research Interest

Data-centric responsible AI, generative models, multimodal foundation models

AI diagnostics by jointly analyzing the data and the model in an explainable way, through the lens of LPMs.
Fairness issue mitigation with data manipulation and synthetic data generation, powered by generative models.
Generative model and VLM innovations with a focus on fairness for data-centric responsible AI.

Manuscripts

DomainGap Embeddings for Generative Dataset Augmentation
Yinong Oliver Wang, Younjoon Chung, Chen Henry Wu, Fernando De la Torre,
Under review at CVPR 2024
"An unsupervised model diagnosis framework to report bias and weakness of computer vision models"

Unsupervised Model Diagnosis
Yinong Oliver Wang, Eileen Li, Jinqi Luo, Zhaoning Wang, Fernando De la Torre,
Under review at CVPR 2024
"An unsupervised model diagnosis framework to report bias and weakness of computer vision models"

Robust Embeddings Via Distributions
Kira Selby, Yinong Oliver Wang, Ruizhe Wang, Peyman Passban, Ahmad Rashid, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Pascal Poupart,
arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.08420 (2021)
"A robust language embeddings as a bayesian framework with BERT and Levenshtein distance"

Experiences

Software Development Engineer - Alexa Hybrid Engine
August 2021 - August 2022
Toronto, ON Canada

Co-founder - Engineering & Business
May 2020 - March 2021
Waterloo, ON Canada

Software Engineer Intern - AV Map Perception
Janurary 2019 - April 2019
Redmond, WA US

Machine Learning Engineer Intern - On-Edge Face Detection
Janurary 2018 - April 2018
Markham, ON Canada

Frontend Developer Intern - Webpage Dev
May 2017 - August 2017
Markham, ON Canada

Full-Stack Developer Intern - Webapp Dev
September 2016 - December 2016
Toronto, ON Canada

Awards

Computational Mathematics Upper Year Scholarship, 2020, Waterloo ON
Faculty of Mathematics Entrance Scholarship, 2016, Waterloo ON
University of Waterloo President's Scholarship, 2016, Waterloo ON
Governor General's Academic Medal (Bronze), 2015, Muskoka ON

Misc

CMU Undergrad AI Mentoring Program (mentor)
CMU Chinese Technology Organization (CTO) (organizer)
CMU Graduate Entrepreneurship Club
2024 McGinnis Venture Competition at Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship
2019 Velocity Fund (VFF) Pitch Competition finalist at Velocity Incubator
2019 Velocity 5k Pitch Competition winner at Velocity Incubator
Polyglot aspirant: self-taught Cantonese, Japanese and Korean; studied French at school
Urban planning enthusiast: my study notes and steam workshop about traffic engineering
Food explorer and serious chef: cooking for people is a part of my meaning of life